April 20, 2012

A Bizarro cartoon, arrived at via the Wikipedia article "Self-cannibalism," which I found seconds after speculating out loud "I wonder if anyone has ever gotten so hungry they've eaten parts of their own body?," which arose out of a conversation with Meade, who was talking about military training for survival behind enemy lines. For example:

Trainees are taught that when stranded in the field, they should eat what they can find, which can include turtles, snakes, insects and other things normally considered unappetizing. The training helps them overcome their food aversions.

... [A] running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength.

A Special Forces captain swallows a worm to the delight of his fellow trainees. Asked what it tasted like, the captain said, "Dirt. And kind of like a worm. Kind of fishy. Kind of fishy. "

You can imagine why we were talking about that. Just reabsorbing and digesting the classic Obama text: "I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

I was saying: Isn't it interesting that he spoke of the texture, but not the taste? I was going to riff in the direction of portraying Obama as coolly Spock-like — missing one of the 5 senses, but then I veered toward literary analysis. It's a neatly compressed comic line: tough... tougher... crunchy. He sticks with the textures because it's funny to struggle through the tough sequence — tough, tougher — and then get — not what comes next grammatically: toughest — but crunchy! because — ha ha — we all know, whether we eat them or not, that insects are crunchy. In those few words, you laugh and you're there inside the immediacy of what the small boy experienced. Once there, you can imagine the flood of sensation and emotion for yourself. The author restrains himself. He doesn't bother us with descriptions of how he felt. You've had enough. You've had dog-tough, snake-tougher, grasshopper-crunchy. You were there, eating it too, because you were a boy with a father and what would that be like?

Anyway, I love that there's a Wikipedia article for so many quite specific things that suddenly pop into your head. From the "Self-cannibalism" article:

As a natural occurrence: A certain amount of self-cannibalism occurs unwillingly, as the body consumes dead cells from the tongue and cheeks...

As a disorder or symptom thereof: Fingernail-biting that develops into fingernail-eating is a form of pica, although many do not consider nail biting as a true form of cannibalism....

Who are the true cannibals?

As a choice: Some people will engage in self-cannibalism as an extreme form of body modification, for example eating their own skin. Others will drink their own blood, a practice called autovampirism, but sucking blood from wounds is generally not seen to be cannibalism. Placentophagy may be a form of self-cannibalism. On January 13, 2007, Chilean artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party for his most intimate friends. The main meal was agnolotti pasta, which was topped with a meatball made from the artist's own fat, removed in the previous year in a liposuction operation.

Citations omitted. And I'll spare you the "As a crime" section, which is really unpleasant. The "Cultural references" list is extensive (and suggests that if you can think up anything gross, there are numerous storytellers who've already gone there):

King Erysichthon from Greek mythology ate himself in insatiable hunger, given him, as a punishment, by Demeter.

In an Arthurian tale, King Agrestes of Camelot goes mad after massacring the Christian disciples of Josephus within his city, and eats his own hands.

Stephen King's short story "Survivor Type", about a man trapped on a small island.

All politics is local. And making cannibalism taboo is basic politics.

The Caribbean Ocean is named for the Caribe Tribe on one island who would take canoe trips to nearby islands and kill or capture other tribes' people to take them home and eat them.

Needless to say this gave the Spanish Ship captains exploring the area great leverage because the could promise to protect the other island's tribes from the Caribes.

Eventually the Spanish went ahead and killed off the Caribes and took their Island.

How can Garage work this into a Scott Walker eating the Unions that he killed angle?

And Sarah Palin definitely killed her own food supply as a child. Is killing a moose enough like killing Rudolph the red nosed reindeer? Dems could run that on MSNBC and see how much it distracts from news of Obama's economic disaster.

1978: Baylor 38, Texas 14The famous "eat the worm" victory. Grant Teaff says he did not, however, eat a worm. He merely chomped on it as part of a pre-game pep talk. In the final game of a disappointing season, Baylor stunned ninth-ranked Texas in a victory Teaff called "the turning point of the entire program.

I've been reading Bloodlands this week. The description of cannibalism in the Soviet Ukraine when Stalin was starving the peasants is very sad. Thus, the Bizarro cartoon doesn't seem very funny. A government powerful enough to give you everything is powerful enough to take away everything. And the Five Year Plan was declared a success.

During famines and sieges, cannibalism happens and not infrequently. It is a last resort, but it happens. It is seldom written about, because, post facto, who's going to brag about how they survived Leningrad......Mad cow disease apparently happens as a result of cow's being fed meal that contains cow flesh. There are reasons beside aesthetics for avoiding human flesh. I would urge all of the Althouse community not to indulge in this practice.

It occurs to me that a movie about the Donner Party would be incredibly disturbing. I've read two magazine articles about it, and it's absolutely chilling. That they missed getting through the pass by one day is sad.

The Stephen King story is a nasty one. All the guy has is a basic surgical kit and a massive supply of heroin, and by the end of the tale, he's eaten both his own legs right up to the pelvis and his earlobes, and has started in on his left arm. One of many of his stories I rather wish I hadn't read.

I remember the King story whenever I encounter the cannibalism subject, it's like a dead animal in the basement that announces itself when the basement door is opened. I thought of it as soon as I started reading the post. I can't watch the movie Alive, it would be in my head the entire time.

My son gave me the King story to read, and being about 20 at the time, he thought it was good. It is a silly story, but one that you think about for the next week. In retrospect, I picture the guy as Johhny Depp.

Yes, I thought that too. "An article about how freaking brilliant Obama is as a communicator." How many of these types of fan letters have I read posted on the ether? Is there an Althouse tag for that subject? Something about pant creases comes to mind, but tis vauge in my memory.

The option of auto-cannibalism is one major reason that multi-cellularity evolved, according to Peter Holland's short Kindle book The Animal Kingdom. It's rather handy to carry your own food supply with you at all times. And in some sense every one of us does it - we build up body fat, then digest it when we don't have enough food.